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A controversial new documentary about the Mormon church's role in the passage of California's Proposition 8 recently premiered last weekend at the Sundance Film Festival.

Using internal church documents and recordings of Mormon officials, and interviews with gay activists, political figures and former members of the church, Greenstreet and his fellow director, Miami journalist Reed Cowan, make the case that the church overstepped its bounds as a nonprofit, religious organization to ensure that Prop 8 passed. But the movie doesn't just focus on that single piece of legislation.

"8" also explores the broader impact of what the filmmakers describe as the church's historically intolerant attitude toward gays, using tales of suicide attempts by young Mormons struggling with their sexual orientations and men still grappling with memories of the shock treatments they endured in order to "cure" them of their homosexuality.

View the trailer here or read more news commentary from the Washington Post on in it here.

Newsweek reports on the increasing phenomenon of "reproductive coercion."

This month, Miller published a study in the journal Contraception detailing "reproductive coercion," when the male partner pressures the other, through verbal threats, physical aggression, or birth-control sabotage, to become pregnant. According to Miller's research, about a third of women reporting partner violence experienced reproductive coercion, as did 15 percent of women who had never reported violence.

Overall, rates of reproductive coercion among family-planning-clinic patients are suprisingly high: about one in five women report their partner having attempted to coerce them into pregnancy. "What we're seeing is that, in the larger scheme of violence against women and girls, it is another way to maintain control," says Miller, who studied 1,300 female patients culled from five family-planning clinics in Northern California. "You have guys telling their partners, 'I can do this because I'm in control' or 'I want to know that I can have you forever.' " This may help explain previous findings of higher rates of unintended pregnancies in relationships with partner violence.

Carter Dillard (Loyola University New Orleans) has posted the
following articles on SSRN:

Future Children as
Property, Duke Journal of Gender Law & Policy (forthcoming).Here is the abstract:

Between Skinner v. Oklahoma and the advent of modern substantive due process, procreation, at least in the eyes of many
courts and commentators, became entrenched as a fundamental, if not absolute,
right. And yet ironically, the establishment of this right, often taken as
symbolic of personal liberty, has diminished autonomy for those persons
inevitably caught on the other end of it – our future children. Expanding
procreative autonomy has diminished public norms that might otherwise ensure
that future children are born into circumstances that also expand their
autonomy. Instead, the broad, modern, privacy-based version of the right to
procreate leaves the matter exclusively and privately to the whims of
prospective parents, allowing them to create any number of children in any
manner of circumstances. This tends to institutionalize the classification of a
group of persons, albeit future persons, who exist morally and legally though
not yet physically, as property. It does so because it gives prospective parents
exclusive and absolute power over members of the class; power to freely access
them, use them, and determine their future relations, and to do so in exclusion
of others’ power, including the constructive power of the members themselves.
This power over future children, which the privacy-based right to procreate
vests in prospective parents, is the unmistakable hallmark of one class of
persons treating another as property.

This article maintains that the most common notion of the right to procreate, the
one seemingly derived from constitutional precedent and today taken as largely
beyond question, tends to treat future children largely as a class of property,
assigned as such to prospective parents. This article also traces the
historical development of the right as part of the larger tradition of treating
existing children as the property of those who create them. Throughout, this
article suggests that the right to procreate so conceived is in tension with an
embedded constitutional principle that prohibits one class of persons from
treating another as property. This tension, which may be called the “property
objection,” demands that we change the way we think about the right to procreate.

Valuing Having
Children, 14 Journal of Law & Family Studies__
(forthcoming).Here is the abstract:

Are there objective values on which
to base the claim of a right to procreate? Can we articulate reasons for having
children so powerful that they justify our doing so, as a matter of right, even
where it would conflict with the interests and values of others? This Article
systematically and critically examines many of the values that, before now,
courts and commentators have simply presumed and relied upon when making the
claim that there is and ought to be a fundamental right to have children. This
Article first develops a methodology for examining the values and interests on
which fundamental moral, and eventually legal, rights might be based. It then
applies this methodology to three categories of values specific to procreation:
autonomy and relational values, as well as self-regarding values, such as the
value of creating genetic lineage. This Article critiques each category as a
basis for a right to procreate, rejecting autonomy and relational values, and
ending with what might be a surprising conclusion about the final category:
that self-regarding values, and the right that would flow from them, are sated
when one has a child.

Jeannie Suk (Harvard Law School) has posted "The Trajectory of Trauma: Bodies and Minds of Abortion Discourse" (forthcoming Columbia L. Rev.) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

What is the legal import of emotional pain following a traumatic event? The idea of women traumatized by abortion has recently acquired a constitutional foothold. The present Article is about this new frontier of trauma. I argue that the legal discourse of abortion trauma grows out of ideas about psychological trauma that have become pervasively familiar in the law through the rise of feminism. The Supreme Court’s statement in Gonzales v. Carhart, that some women who have abortions feel “regret” resulting in “severe depression and loss of esteem,” has provoked searing criticism because talk of protecting women from psychological harm caused by their own decisions seems to recapitulate paternalistic stereotypes inconsistent with modern egalitarian ideals. I argue that a significant context for the newly prominent discourse of abortion regret is the legal reception of psychological trauma that has continually gained momentum through feminist legal thought and reform since the 1970s. Rather than representing a stark and unmotivated departure, the notion of abortion trauma continues a legal discourse that grew up in precisely that period: a feminist discourse of trauma around women’s bodies and sexuality. This intellectual context gives meaning to the present discourse of women’s psychological pain in our legal system. The ideas informing abortion regret are utterly familiar once contextualized in modern legal understandings of women that have developed in the period since Roe.

FERTILITY regulators have triggered
a new row over designer babies by allowing doctors to destroy embryos affected
by more than 100 genetic conditions, including many illnesses that are not
life-threatening.

…

The Human Fertilisation and
Embryology Authority (HFEA), has published a list of 116 inherited conditions
that fertility clinics can screen out without requiring special permission.

Although many of the conditions can cause gross
deformity, protracted pain and premature death, the list also includes
illnesses, including cancer and blindness, which can strike late in life after
a victim has enjoyed decades of good health.

A number of the conditions are not life-threatening
or can be readily treated because of advances in medicine.

New data shows that, for the first time in a decade, both teen pregnancy and abortion rates have risen.

"One of the nation's shining success stories of the past two decades is in danger of unraveling," said Sarah Brown of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy. "Clearly, the nation's collective efforts to convince teens to postpone childbearing must be more creative and more intense, and they must begin today."

The cause of the increase is the subject of debate. Several experts blamed the increase in teen pregnancies on sex-education programs that focus on encouraging abstinence. Others said the reversal could be due to a variety of factors, including an increase in poverty, an influx of Hispanics and complacency about AIDS, prompting lax use of birth control such as condoms.

"It could be a lot of things coming together," said Rebecca Maynard, a professor of economics and social policy at the University of Pennsylvania. "It could be we just bottomed out, and whenever you are at the bottom, it tends to wiggle around. This may or may not be a sustained rise."

Already, there have been reports over the weekend of child
trafficking in Haiti following the earthquake.Ten Americans have
been arrested on these suspicions, but they deny any wrongdoing.

From Reuters:

The suspects were detained at Malpasse, Haiti's main border crossing with the Dominican Republic, after Haitian police conducted a routine search of their vehicle.

Authorities said the
Americans had no documents to prove they had cleared the adoption of the 33
children -- aged 2 months to 12 years -- through any embassy and no papers
showing they were made orphans by the quake in the impoverished Caribbean country.

Joanna Grossman (Hofstra University School of Law) has recently posted an excellent two-part commentary on whether the Baby M decision should survive, particularly in the context of a recent New Jersey case. The case involves two gay men who were legally married. One of the men provided sperm and a donor egg was used, with the resulting embryo implanted into the (non-egg donor) surrogate. After twin girls were born, the surrogate sought a judgment that the surrogacy agreement she signed relinquishing her rights was a nullity and that she was entitled to parental rights. The trial court agreed, resting on Baby M. Grossman argues that Baby M should be revisited in light of distinctions between its facts and those in the most recent case and reproductive advancements since the Baby M decision.

But should Baby M. still carry the day? More than twenty years later, with tremendous advances in reproductive technology (including the ability to conceive children after the death of their biological parents), dramatic increases in the number of same-sex couples having and raising children, and the ever-widening variety of family forms, the ruling itself seems dated.

Would the New Jersey Supreme Court have ruled the same way if Baby M. had not been genetically related to Mary Beth Whitehead? Maybe not. The court's language in that case is laden with assumptions about the prenatal bond between mother and child and the "devastation" to women who irrevocably consent to give up their babies. The opinion is couched in terms of "mother" and "child". But is a gestational surrogate truly the "mother" of the child she carries – even if she has carried the child with full knowledge that it is not in any way genetically hers? Do women who relinquish a child have a similar experience regardless of whether they are genetically related to the child?

These seem to be open theoretical and empirical questions that are worthy of serious consideration by the New Jersey Supreme Court, or by the state's legislature.

As is often the case with family law, social change and science have clearly outpaced the law in this context. Reasonable minds may differ on how to answer the basic legal questions surrounding surrogacy, but individuals who wish to utilize surrogacy to become parents deserve renewed attention to the issue, so that they may have certainty as to whether the child they are joyfully expecting will be legally their own.

Margaret Ryznar has recently published To Work, or Not to Work? The Immortal Tax Disincentives for Married
Women, 13 Lewis & Clark L. Rev. 921 (2009).Here is the abstract:

Among the most fundamental barriers
to the aggressive participation of many married women in the work force are the
disincentives for secondary income earners embedded in the federal tax code.
Specifically, the current code contains a marriage penalty, which is aggravated
by the progressive nature of taxation and any potential increases in income
taxation. Meanwhile, child-care expenses, a prerequisite for entry into the
labor market, are treated inadequately. Although these immortal problems persist
despite political pushes for relief, new attention to this topic is warranted
given the Obama Administration’s pledge for tax law reform. If the principle to
be prioritized is that married women should not face tax disincentives to
pursue paid work, then the tax code must finally deal with these issues
effectively.

Marvin Gaye was a tremendous singer, but he wasn't
always so great at keeping track of his personal finances. He spent lavishly,
which meant that he often couldn't cover his bills.

He was having particularly big trouble footing the
bill for his 1977 divorce from Anna Gordy, so Gaye's lawyer worked out a novel
settlement: Gaye would record a new album and give all of the royalties to
Gordy as alimony.

Gaye headed into the studio and recorded the double
album "Here, My Dear" to fulfill this deal with Gordy. Unfortunately
for Gordy, critics and audiences didn't love Gaye's divorce-themed concept
album; although today's critics praise the album, it was the singer's worst
charting record of the 1970s.